How we walk, where we walk, and why we walk tells the world who and what we are, says Geoff Nicholson, the arch satirist whose Bleeding London was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. In this mildly obsessive paean to pedestrianism, Nicholson cites walking-inspired creative types like Paul Auster, Charles Dickens, Bob Dylan, and Buster Keaton; takes walking tours of New York, Los Angeles, London, and the Outback; and introduces us to people who variously prefer to walk naked, in costume, only at night, in a circular path, for thousands of miles at a time, for causes, and for no reason whatsoever.

"Mundane though walking may be, Nicholson tells us in this leisurely, charmingly obsessive literary stroll, pedestrianism is not without drama, from pratfalls like the one in which he broke his arm on an innocuous Hollywood Hills street to getting lost in the desert of western Australia. Walks, he reminds us, have inspired writers from Thoreau and Emerson to Dickens and Joyce, as well as musicians from Fats Domino to Aerosmith. Nicholson guides readers from the streets of L.A.—where walkers are invariably regarded with suspicion—to New York City and London. He considers the history of eccentric walkers like the competitive pedestrian Capt. Robert Barclay Allardice, whose early 19th-century walking feats gave him the reputation of a show-off. From street photographers to perfect walks—the first at the Poles, the first on the moon—and walks that never happened, Nicholson's genial exploration of this most ordinary, ubiquitous activity is lively and entertaining."—Publishers Weekly